There are some major flaws in the advertising of this film. First, there’s the line on the film poster: “A comedy with a language all its own.” No way is this a comedy, unless the definition of the term has changed radically in the last few years; it’s a drama about acculturation, and has few if any punchlines. Second, Adam Sandler and Tea Leoni are given top billing. The main character in this film is Paz Vega’s “Flor”; if they were giving out Oscars to the players in the film (not likely, but certainly not impossible), Leoni could get nothing higher than “Best Supporting Actress”, and if Sandler got “Best Actor” for this film it would only be because there was no genuine male lead.

The story is narrated by Flor’s daughter, Cristina, ostensibly as a Princeton University admission essay. Flor, abandoned by her husband, takes her six-year-old daughter and leaves Mexico for a better life in the United States. (How they leave Mexico is left intentionally unclear by Cristina, but the scene showing them towing their meager luggage across arid grasslands toward a distant range of hills, supposedly in the United States, is suggestive …) They find refuge with Flor’s cousin, who manages an apartment block in Latino Los Angeles, and for some years Flor works two jobs to earn the money necessary to support herself and her daughter. But when Cristina reaches puberty, it becomes obvious that Flor needs to spend more time with her, and so she takes a job keeping house for an Anglo family, the Claskys. This proves to be something of a problem, since during more than half a decade in L.A. Flor has learned not so much as a word of English, and the Claskys, like most Americans, don’t know that other languages actually exist.

The language problem, however, is a minor part of the film; more important is Flor’s interaction with the family. The husband, John (Sandler), who is a very successful chef, is comfortable and happy with his wife Deborah (Leoni), his mother-in-law Evelyn (Cloris Leachman), his daughter Bernice and his son Georgie. Georgie, who apparently takes after his father, has very few hangups, and is relatively unimportant to the film; but Deborah is extremely insecure, both about herself and about overweight Bernice, and Evelyn is a lush. The story is primarily about how the family incorporates Flor and Cristina into itself, often in ways that make Flor extremely uncomfortable, and about how Flor eventually extricates herself and Cristina.

We saw this film at a Saturday evening sneak preview. My experience with sneak previews is that they tend to be presented for films which, for whatever reason, are not likely to make good at the box office. This film, however, seemed to me to stand head and shoulders above other such films. It deserves to be seen.